Don't let what I am about to say turn you off from this recipe or decide that it is not incredible. Because it is. Well, according to a dozen lemon-loving testers these Luscious Lemon Bars are incredible.
I do not like lemon bars. There, I said it.
But don't judge this recipe by the sheer fact that I have never been a lemon dessert fan. My readers consistently ask for lemon bars, lemon meringue, or lemon cakes, so I bit the bullet for you all and worked hard on getting this recipe right. It took quite a few tries because I wasn't sure what the original really tasted like, and came up with a cheesecake tasting bar and a lemon jello bar before hitting the nail on the head. I performed some R&D (I even took a bite of a store-bought one just for the sake of the experiment!) and gathered a team of friends who adored lemon bars and came up with something so close to the original you won't even miss them. Well, you may miss the dusting of powdered sugar because that is so not paleo friendly, but the taste and texture of these is spot on.
The nut-free crust is sturdy like a shortbread and holds its own against the rich, creamy, gooey lemon filling. I dusted these with coconut flour for visual appeal, but it doesn't really do much for the taste so you can either leave it off or splurge and dust them with organic evaporated powdered cane sugar.
Enjoy these lemon bars with the special mothers in your life this weekend. Me? Well you can bet there will be something chocolate and not lemon. 🙂
tip: these seeds are fully raw and all natural. grind the sunflower seeds in a blender or coffee grinder. Sift and discard any large fragments before measuring. Blanched almond flour may also be used in place of the ground sunflower seeds.
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Amy
They could be dusted with coconut sugar or unsweetened coconut! I might try this recipe, when I made the ..other lemon bars …i thought they were way way too sweet…….i guess me cutting back on sugar is paying off….im getting there.
Katharine Johnson
Yay lemon!!!! Thanks!
Sonja
Awesome. I asked my kids and hubby to make these for mother’s day for me. I can’t wait till Sunday.
Monica
what about dextrose in place of honey? please let me know if the sostitution could be good. thank you 🙂
Carri Elizabeth
Your recipes all look wonderful! I have been doing GAPS and trying Paleo to heal my leaky gut. I am confused about your use of nuts/seeds and the Paleo diet. It’s my understanding I should not be eating much nuts/seeds at all. Do you have any input on this subject?
Against All Grain
Do you mean for gaps or paleo?
Betsy
Mine are done and while they are delicious, my top cracked and there were white deposits on the top. Any idea as to why?
Monique
Mine cracked also. I guess the trick that people suggest to avoid that with pumpkin pie might work with this too? Once it’s about done then you turn off the oven (let a bit of heat out if you’re worried it will burn) and also it to cool in the oven. It’s the rapid change in temperature I think.
Against All Grain
I’ve had that happen with pumpkin pie. I find it happens if I slightly overbake the filling, even by a couple of minutes. But I do know that the oven door cracked open with a wooden spoon while they cool is a good trick. I find its best to turn the oven off around 15 min and crack it open. The filling will continue to bake a bit while the oven cools off.
Apryl Spencer
I made these this morning and I can’t wait to take them to Brunch tomorrow. They are awesome!!!!!
amber
Hi Danielle,
These are just beautiful! Wow. My favorite is anything with lemon.
I’ve also been using a lot of sunflower seed flour. I just can’t digest almond flour and seem to do really well with the seed flour. I liked that you included it in this recipe. Yeah.
Have a wonderful weekend and a fabulous Mother’s Day!
xo,
–Amber
Susan
I just made these. They smell so good. Mine were not ready at 15 minutes and seemed to need a bit more time to finish. I should have only gone a couple minutes more instead of 5.They seemed very firm when I removed them from the oven and had a couple little cracks. But I am sure they will still be delicious.
Julie Williams
These look very good. When I make them, I plan to use powdered Swerve to dust on top and use Nature’s Hollow sugar free honey in place of the honey. I try to keep sugar to a bare minimum. Thanks for sacrificing for those of us who like lemon. Happy Mother’s Day!
heather
I made these saturday night using the almond flour in place of the seeds. other than that i followed it to a T. ehile the taste was excellent, i think the texture was off…i dony know what i did erong, but it was a lemon mush rather than a bar. haha. everyone loved the way they tasted, but they def. coul not be eaten as a bar :/
Any idea what i could have done wrong? And just to be sutr- what SHOULD the texture be?
Against All Grain
Hmmm did you bake them long enough? If you followed the filling directions precisely, you should have had a soft silky custard type filling but it holds together. It should not be mushy. After refrigerating, we are able to pick these up with our fingers and eat them like a bar, no problem.
emaliah82
I am absolutely obsessed with lemon and am constantly trying new healthful versions of lemon bars. I LOVED the filling flavor but have to say that the crust is not quite to my liking. I have never made a crust with sunflower seeds and am wondering if it is that flavor I am not liking. Now, reading on the other notes posted here, sounds like I did over-bake my filling. Could the over-baking change the flavor of the crust at all?? Any thoughts on this??
Thank you for constantly sharing wonderful recipes! Several of you cookie recipes are absolutely some of my favorite. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Against All Grain
No overbaking wouldn’t change the crust. You may be tasting the sunflower seeds which do take a little getting used to after using sweet almond flour. Did you use raw sunflower seed kernels? That would mean not roasted or salted. I am so happy you liked the filling! If you want to make them again, you could use my graham cracker pie crust as the base instead of the crust from this recipe.
Marcia DesRosiers
Made these for the Cafe at church on Sunday – a huge hit!! I used almond flour instead of the sunflower. They are very tart yet sweet – really yummy. I also got some white spots and in hind sight I would say that was pieces of egg white – also had cracks didn’t effect the flavor at all hee hee
I did 1 + 1/3 recipe to fit into a 9×13 pan – I have an 8×8 or a 9×13 but never heard of a 9×9 pan?
SandiRows
Made these last night to be my birthday treat for today! The lemon custard part is delicious, out of this world really and a prefect match to the lemon bars I was craving. The crust was a lot of work for me (I am very new to paleo baking) and was maybe too heavy, or too grainy, it just seemed a bit off. I shared them with a friend who has been eating paleo for awhile and she thought they were outstanding :). I also noticed it took mine a long time to set-up in the oven. More like 30 minutes on 350. I saw in a pp to try the graham cracker crumb recipe for the crust. I think I’ll do that next time. Thanks for putting this recipe together! It made my birthday sweet.
Against All Grain
Thanks! So happy you liked the filling. If the crust was grainy, you may not have sifted the sunflower seed flour well enough. You could try almond flour next time too if you want it to be a little lighter and sweeter.
Kristina
Delicious! I just made these and they are so good. It’s great to have a paleo substitute for something I love because we all knows that changing our eating habits is hard enough! The crust came out really different for mine, still delicious, but it’s not hard or “crust like” it’s more like the filling. I don’t have a food processor so I used a hand mixer, could that be the problem?
Thanks for all your delicious recipes Danielle, they are amazing!
Against All Grain
That shouldn’t make much of a different unless the flour wasn’t finely sifted. The texture of the ground seeds should be like a finely ground almond flour, slightly more coarse than all-purpose flour but the sifting should remove all of the large pieces that didn’t get ground up. It’s also important to measure the flour after it has been sifted.
ziabaki
I just posted a lemon bar recipe too! Great minds think alike! I’ll have to give yours a try too.
Natalie
I can hardly believe how absolutely incredibly delicious these are!!
When I found out I had to go dairy/gluten/sugar free the first thing I thought of was never eating a lemon bar again!
I’ve searched for months for something to replace it.
Ahhh life is good again 🙂
Thank you!!
Kristine
I made these last night. I thought the crust was well-flavored. I tend to dislike coconut flour baked goods but the addition of the sunflower seeds really overcame the powdery feel of the coconut flour. I loved them and plan to make them again.
I took the lazy route and just pulverized the whole peeled lemon in the Vitamix as opposed to juicing it. I didn’t have many lemons and needed to maximize my output. Still, they were fab.
Thanks for a great recipe.
Sarah
I just made these & they turned out perfect! I substituted the honey with organic Rice Malt Syrup. It has half the sugar content of honey but still sweet enough to satisfy a sweet tooth. Makes it a healthy treat for my kids afternoon tea 🙂
Emily
I just made these last night. Delicous! The top cracked on mine like a couple other people, but now I know what to do next time. I wasn’t crazy about the crust, until I let it sit overnight in the fridge, and it absorbed some of the moister and is perfect! I’m tempted to just make the topping and have some lemon curd on hand. 🙂 Thank you!
Penney
I have to be honest and say that I’m super lazy to make crusts for any type of dish, but I wanted a lemon dessert so I followed the lemon part of the recipe, poured them into half pint mason jars and baked them in a water bath. They turned out really well, like a super lemony custard, I ate it warm, but I imagine a few hours in the fridge would serve them really well 🙂
Rachel
I made these yesterday. Do you think they can be frozen? Thanks
Jessica Boyd
So I cheated, I wanted a paleo crust, but I wanted to use the lemon pie recipe that I love (which has sugar in it) so I had sunflower seeds and shredded coconut, but neither of the flours, so I just used those instead and put all the ingredients in my vitamix. It did not turn out doughy, it was really wet, I probably made sunbutter on accident. Anyway, so I put it in the bottom of the pan and then poured my lemon pie stuff on top (which is actually similar to yours but doesn’t have the coconut flour and uses sugar) and put it in to bake. When it was done, imagine my surprise to find that the crust had floated to the top! Lol! It was still delish, but I just thought you might think that was funny too 🙂
Bellichka
You made a cobbler it sounds like!
Kristen
My crust has green specks from being in the fridge overnight!? What is going on?!
Anne
Same as Kristen here: I made the lemon bars yesterday evening, actually turned them into a little cake as I had a bit too much dough at hand – they turned out great, but after a night in the fridge my crust turned green as well. I think that might be because of the sunflower seeds, I think? Has anyone had a similar experience or knows what the cause for this is?
Sonia
Anne & Kristen, did you get a response re the green?
Against All Grain
This is a common occurrence when using sunflower seeds and/or sunbutter. Read Danielle’s blog page linked here: https://againstallgrain.com/2013/03/15/cinnamon-oatmeal-raisin-cookies-st-patricks-day-style/ for more information.
Jacquelyn
Made these the other night for my family… they gobbled them up and only my Dad and I are paleo! Such a delicious recipe. Thank you so much Danielle!
Casey
I’m so excited to try this … I *adore* lemon stuff. However, I actually wake up craving cheesecake … so if you have a recipe that tastes like that, please PLEASE share!!!! 😀
Marzena
I just made it and it tastes like heaven! It is my first grain-free, sugar-free cake and I am more than happy with the result, I try not to it all of it at once haha. Can’t wait to try more recipes from your website. Greetings from Poland!
Heidi
Love this recipe!!! I can’t have honey (am on the Candida diet) – what could I substitute it with? I’ll use stevia and Xylitol, but am assuming I’ll need some liquid surrogate for 1/2 cup of honey?
Ashley
Raw organic coconut nectar is yummy and might work for you:)
Jen
Thank you! I had a similar question, I was going to try pure maple lol but I hadn’t heard of raw coconut NECTAR awesome!
Emily
Would arrowroot flour work instead of coconut flour for the filling?? Thanks! Can’t wait to try it!!
Danielle
Arrowroot is a good sub for coconut flour, but I have not tried it in this recipe. Let me know how it turns out!
Kelly
Can you use almond flour instead of coconut?
Danielle
Hi Kelly, you cannot substitute almond flour for coconut flour because coconut flour is much more absorbent. A better sub for coconut flour is arrowroot starch. You can read my FAQ for more information https://againstallgrain.com/f-a-q/
Angie
I followed this recipe exactly and chilled it upon completion. Two hours later, I cut the bars and placed them on serving plates. At this point I noticed the crust up against the lemon custard had turned a turquoise green…resembling mold. I’m convinced it’s not mold but looks completely unappetizing! Any ideas what caused this?
Danielle
Angie, This is a common occurrence when using sunflower seeds and/or sunbutter. Read my blog page linked here: https://againstallgrain.com/2013/03/15/cinnamon-oatmeal-raisin-cookies-st-patricks-day-style/ for more information. Or check out this article as well. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-are-those-green-specks-in-my-biscuits-75415377/?no-ist=
Jen
hmmm I reaaaallllyyy want to make these but I have a question. (I’ll probably just experiment anyway lol but I am allergic to honey as well as the whole grain and sugar thing… I typically use only coconut sugar… would that still work since it isn’t liquid?
Or would pure maple work better do you think?
Naomi
Has anyone tried freezing this? I’d love to keep some away for hubby and my little one 🙂
Danielle
Maple syrup is a great sub for honey in many of Danielle’s recipes! ~Eileen
NancyR
I like the filling a lot, the crust not so much. The filling was lemony, creamy, and very slightly sweet, and it set up just right. Very yummy! I detest the flavor of honey so I used sorghum in place of it and liked the results. But the crust was too dense and heavy for my personal tastes…probably because of the high amount of coconut flour (which I generally don’t like much in baked goods, just because it is so heavy and dense). I understand why it’s used – it acts as a binder in paleo baking – but there are better ways to get a good, light crust that holds together. I am going to try these again but change up the crust recipe to rely less on coconut flour as the binder.
Suzanne
I thought I messed up after realizing I had bought and used sesame seeds for the crust (went ahead with it as I was pressed for time)….to my surprise (and the delight if the chef I was cooking for), it was GREAT. While I’m curious what it would be like with sunflower seeds, this is really amazing with sesame seeds (comes out like actual shortbread texture!). Thanks so much for the inspiring recipe!
Suzanne
Yes, they froze great (although I used sesame seed instead of sunflower). They were great frozen and also thawed. You can tell I did extensive testing in this area. I can also tell you with scientific precision that they are just as good at 8am as they are at 12am. Also 3pm…..and 10am. See a pattern here?
Suzanne
Coconut nectar is still sugar that will feed her yeast….she needs something to bulk up the stevia (she will use much less of it than honey as it is far sweeter)
Leah Markegene Homa
Can someone please tell me if I am supposed to melt the butter first before putting it with the dough ingredients???